Exhibition 2009 and book launch (futura publications 2008).
‘Red is rare in the landscape. It gains its strength through its absence’ ¹
If photography as an art medium would at some point partake, from its place within the historical avant-garde, in debates regarding the ontology and autonomy of the work of art, in abolishing the conservative values of art production and in changing ‘the course of history’, today the medium’s scope seems to have widened to such an extent that we should mainly talk of what is a new version of the visual document and of its significance for the workings of memory.
Developments in contemporary photography were largely the result of this mnemonic potential inherent in the medium itself and open to exploitation on both the individual and collective levels. Besides, as soon as the link between art and the document was activated, its impact was evident not only in the practice of art photography but also in the manner by which the medium was, and continues to be, employed in everyday life: in our effort to make time stand still, to keep visual ‘notes’ that we may later refer to, to produce evidence (however selective) for those incidents of everyday life that matter to us the most, to preserve the memory of places and faces, to build an archive of images that corresponds to our identity, our memory and personal history, connecting our past and present while at the same time ‘giving the photographic document the aura of an anthropological artifact and the authority of a social instrument’ ².
Outside and beyond the realms of society and the economy of the information, the mnemonic faculty can also be defined as an ability that allows the subject to connect to a specific event in a manner not always subject to a rigid causality, but rather conducive to the activity of the imagination. When expressed in the form of images, memory can lend history a human and often traumatic quality and thus operate as the locus where attempts for coming to grips with the event itself take place. In this case, what is at stake is memory not as ‘duty’ (‘devoir’) but as ‘labor’ (‘travail’), as Paul Ricoeur suggested: a form of labor rooted in the dialectics of past and present, same and other, the imaginary and the real. For isn’t the photographic image a representation, in the present, of a past that is absent? Doesn’t it always signal a form of absence? And that, insofar as it is a medium that preserves a fixed and unchanging form of a distant reality subject to decay, part of our effort to command, to prevail upon the present by capturing the past; insofar as it is an attempt to secure a direct, immediate access to the real in the form of images and thus to experience anew the degree to which the real is decisively distant and unattainable³.
Hence, the photographic depiction of an interior, a landscape, a gesture, an encounter, a face, should operate, by means of a return to the actual event, as a signifier for an ‘invisible nature’, for death, for the desire and longing that sets into motion the production of meaning and impels our engagement in this process. The emotional experience is not a mere point of reference, but rather something that is activated or executed upon, something lived anew as experience of the recollection.
The autobiographical narrative composed by the images of a photographic album – fragments of a past reality – relates both to the mechanism of memory and to the (precarious) link between what was and what continues to be, while at the same time it seems to be testing art’s potential for sublimation and catharsis. In this impossible attempt to faithfully depict reality in the form of an image, it is fiction that comes to bridge the gaps opened by the inexorable contradiction between narrator and protagonist. Thus, the autobiographical visual narrative will necessarily include instances of elimination, interpretation, omission, distortion of the real, which correspond to acts of repression and projection, to fears… It is not to be taken as document of a fixed identity, but as a trace left behind in the quest for an identity that is by definition fragmentary, fluid, ever-changing, and it becomes all the more interesting when it manages to speak not only of the author, but also of every reader.
The images featured in the pages of Lilium address our emotion. Premising the past as source and the visual stimulus as identity, they compose the narrative of a life and tell the story of the self. By selecting and isolating moments in the space-time continuum and by matching images to feelings and desires, Elisavet Moraki has offered a record of fragments in her search for a new whole; she has constructed versions of the real, images in which each one of us may recognize a part of themselves.
Polina Kosmadaki
¹ From D. Jarman’s, Chroma, London 1994. The work… featured on pages… is made up of excerpts from this book.
² Οkwui Enwezor, Archive Fever. Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art, International Center of Photography, New York 2008, p. 13.
³ Susan Sontag, «O Kosmos-Eikona», Peri photografias, [‘The Image-world’, in the Greek edition of Susan Sontag’s On Photography (1973)], Athens 1993, p.p. 145-67.
